The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 13.2 & Lightroom Ecosystem (February 2024)?”

Sort Order

There are a few new options in the Sort Order pop-up: City, State, Country, Aperture, Focal Length, Shutter Speed, and ISO Speed.

Filters & Smart Collections

There are a few new options in the Metadata Filter and Smart Collection criteria:

• Uses Masking shows images that have any kind of mask.
• Uses AI Mask shows images that have an AI-based mask (Sky, Subject, Background, Object or People).
• Uses Lens Blur uses the Early Access Lens Blur tool.
• Uses Healing shows images that use any kind of healing adjustment (Clone, Heal or Remove).
• Uses AI Heal shows images that use the AI-based Content-Aware Remove tool.

Victoria Bampton

Nice to see Lightroom expanding its sorting and filtering options, but as I have recently discovered, they remain oddly underdeveloped.

Modern Lightroom doesn’t display the Metering Mode of the exposure in its ‘Info’ panel (top right)

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to photograph a live Cirque du Soleil show together with a group of photographers. While talking about the best settings to capture images in the relative low light environment, one of them brought up that some people recommend using the Spot metering mode instead of the default evaluative metering (on Canon cameras at least). While I’m not convinced spot would be the right choice under those circumstances, this led to another interesting question: is it possible to compare the results afterwards, meaning to classify RAW images in Lightroom based on their in-camera metering mode?

The answer was a disappointing no… Lightroom Classic shows the metering mode from the EXIF data on its ‘Metadata’ panel for individual files, but I have found no way to select images based on this field – short of third-party add-ons. The new Lightroom (despite being praised by some as the inevitable future of editing) is more primitive still, as this information is nowhere to be found.

What’s more striking about this omission is that even in Windows Explorer you can add the metering mode as a new column in the Details view, and then filter or sort it just like any other standard file property. This may provide a possible workaround: you could manually add tags to files in Windows Explorer based on the metering mode, and only then import them to Lightroom, which should keep the manual tags – granted, I haven’t tried this method, so it might not work as expected. So, despite this recent update, there seems to be considerable work pending in Lightroom to improve its organizing tools.